If (magazine) - Bibliographic Details

Bibliographic Details

If was a digest-sized magazine throughout its life. It began at 164 pages and with only the fifth issue, November 1952, dropped to 124 pages. The page count increased again to 134 pages with the July 1959 issue, and to 164 pages with the September 1965 issue; it stayed at this length until the September–October 1970 issue. The page count was then dropped to 180 with the June 1971 issue, and to 164 for the very last issue, December 1974. It was priced at 35 cents to begin with, and increased to 40 cents with the March 1963 issue, to 50 cents with the December 1964 issue, to 60 cents with the August 1967 issue, and finally to 75 cents with the September–October 1970 issue. With the April 1972 issue, UPD began using card stock for the covers, rather than paper, and continued to do so until the magazine ceased publication.

The magazine was bimonthly until the March 1954 issue, which was followed by April 1954, inaugurating a monthly period that ran until June 1955. This was followed by August 1955, resuming a bimonthly schedule that ran until July 1964, with only one irregularity, when the February 1959 issue was followed by July 1959. After July 1964, If ran a monthly schedule until April 1970, with three omissions: there were no issues dated September 1964, June 1969, or August 1969. From May–June 1970, the issues were bimonthly and bore the names of two months. This bimonthly sequence ran through the last issue at the end of 1974. The date the magazine printed on the cover reverted to a single month with the June 1971 issue, though the contents page still used two months to identify the issue. The volume numbering began with six issues to a volume: there were three errors on the magazine contents page, with volume 8 number 1 incorrectly printed as volume 7 number 6; volume 9 number 3 printed as volume 8 number 6; and volume 10 number 1 printed as volume 10 number 6. Volume 14, which began in March 1964, ran through the end of the year, with seven numbers; the remaining volumes had 12 numbers each except for volume 19 which had 10 and volume 22 which had 8.

Several British editions of If were produced. In 1953 and 1954, Strato Publications reprinted 15 issues, numbering them from 1 to 15; another 18 were reprinted between 1959 and 1962, with the issue numbers being restarted at 1 again. Between January and November 1967 a UK edition appeared from Gold Star Publications; these were identical to the US edition dated ten months previously. Between 1972 and 1974, 15 of the UPD editions of If were imported, renumbered and repriced for UK distribution. The numbering, inexplicably, ran from 1 to 9, and then 11, 1, 13, 3, 4 and 5.

The editorial succession at If was as follows:

• Paul W. Fairman: March–September 1952.
• James L. Quinn: November 1952 – August 1958. From May 1953 to March 1954, Larry T. Shaw was Associate Editor; he wrote editorials for at least three issues, beginning with September 1953, and generally did most of the editorial work.
• Damon Knight: October 1958 – February 1959.
• H.L. Gold: July 1959 – November 1961.
• Frederik Pohl, January 1962 – May 1969.
• Ejler Jakobsson: October 1969 – January/February 1974
• Jim Baen: March/April–December 1974.
• Clifford Hong: September/November 1986.